Sky high: who'd be an airline pilot today?

Sky high: who'd be an airline pilot today?

Every time we fly, we trust our life to a stranger. As well as mechanical failures and disastrous weather, a pilot must be ready to handle stress, terrorism and hours in the air. What kind of person sits inside that locked cockpit?

‘We rarely stop to think about who the pilots are, or about the pressures and challenges they encounter every day – until something drastic happens.’
Photograph: Getty

The most striking thing about the conversation was its utter calm. “Mayday, mayday, Speedbird 2276, request fire services.”

“Speedbird 2276, heavy fire services on the way,” responded McCarran air traffic control in Las Vegas, instantly, levelly. It was mid-afternoon on Tuesday 8 September, a bright, sunny day. “We are evacuating on the runway. We have a fire, I repeat, we are evacuating.” And within four minutes, 170 people who had been sitting back, relaxing, feeling the Gatwick-bound British Airways Boeing 777-200 accelerate to takeoff speed, were out on the tarmac and running, while the left engine roared into flame behind them. The search for a hero began (as it always does) nearly as quickly, and it did not take long to find one: the pilot, Captain Chris Henkey, from Berkshire. An ex-wife was tracked down, a current fiancee, a previous brush with death discovered. “To be honest,” Henkey said, “the way I acted just came naturally… I did what I was trained to do. The whole crew did the same.”

There will always be those who fear flying, but most of us board jetliners, search for our seats and cede control, trusting pilots the way the pilots in turn trust the air – something invisible, elemental, hopefully true. We rarely stop to think about who those pilots are, or about the pressures and challenges they encounter every day – until something drastic happens.

Henkey was 63, days away from retiring when his plane caught fire. Once a publican, he had been flying for 42 years, during which time the industry has changed almost beyond recognition. In 1969, according to Airbus’s most recent figures, world annual traffic was measured at just over 500bn RPK (or revenue passenger-kilometres); in 2014, it was just over 6,000bn, with an 85% increase occurring since 9/11 – a surprising figure, in some ways, when that period has seen not only the attack on the twin towers, but attempted shoe bombings, underwear bombings, printer cartridge bombings and liquid bombings. More recently, we’ve had the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines MH370, shortly followed by the shooting down of MH17.

All this – coming on top of the ever-present possibility of accidents and technical failures, of which there have been at least 13 since the beginning of 2014 – has a direct impact on pilots. Before 9/11, people hijacked a plane to get something, or somewhere; latterday terrorists’ willingness to die – and to take everyone on a plane with them – has radically changed the relationship between crew and passengers, any one of whom could now be a mortal threat. (Of course, this can work in the other direction, too: it is strongly suspected that Andreas Lubitz, a Germanwings pilot, deliberately flew a jet carrying 148 people into the French Alps, killing all of them.)

Latterday terrorists’ willingness to die has radically changed the relationship between crew and passengers

But as each threat has arisen, security has been stepped up to calm passenger fears: we take it as normal, these days, that we are allowed only tiny bottles of toiletries, have to remove our shoes, are routinely patted down, fingerprinted (if destined for the US), that there might be air marshalls on planes or that the pilots (again, in the US) might be carrying guns; that we cannot see past the reinforced cockpit doors unless the aircraft is on the ground (a measure that backfired when Lubitz was able to lock his copilot out, and that may come under review once the investigation into that crash has ended).

The events of 9/11 had huge financial repercussions, costing the industry three years of growth; this was followed by the 2008 financial crash, which cost another two years. Airlines have been forced to become leaner, meaner and more competitive in order to survive, and have done so: the industry has grown exponentially, due in part to rising individual prosperity in emerging economies and the boom of the budget airline. This in turn has put yet more pressure on pilots, who have increasingly had to bear the brunt of training costs, of unpredictable employment, of the competition itself, in terms of increasing hours flown and faster turnarounds.

How are pilots trained, these days, to cope with all this? What goes on behind those tightly closed cockpit doors?

***

CAE Oxford Aviation Academy looks out over ranks of friendly little Pipers and Cessnas, executive jets, private aircraft, Airbus helicopters. According to Balpa, the British pilots’ union, is one of the three most respected pilot training schools in Europe (the others being CTC Aviation, in Southampton, and Flight Training Europe, in Jerez, Spain). Each year, CAE turns out up to 2,000 pilots who go on to jobs at all manner of airlines, from Aegean to easyJet, BA to Wizz Air. It also trains pilots for other nations’ armies, but will not say which. “Security issues,” says Bryan Field, 61, who manages CAE’s airline careers and assessment centre, drily. But “they’re all, shall we say, allied airforces”.

In theory, the minimum education required to become a pilot is five GCSEs, and you can apply before your 18th birthday. In practice, instructors prefer rather more, if only because A-levels, for instance, give applicants a taste of just how much self-discipline and application are going to be involved. There is an online psychometric test. No full medical at this stage, but basic height and weight ratios must be fulfilled.

The next step is a day at CAE, undergoing tests – of mental arithmetic, for instance, and hand-eye coordination – the latter with a screen full of horizon-lines and green numbers, and a joystick, every tiny movement of which causes a disturbingly large reaction. Boys initially tend to do better than girls at this task, says marketing manager Emma O’Donnell, largely because of video games. And that’s the few girls who get this far, or any further: only 6% of pilots are women. Field believes this is because girls aren’t encouraged into maths or science, but that isn’t the only problem. One 22-year-old cadet currently at CAE was told by her careers counsellor not to apply because piloting was a man’s career.

For Amy Williams, 35, a keen, infectiously upbeat cadet, the fact that she was a woman applying to fly commercial jets was far less worrying than the fact of her age. She had already worked as a flight attendant, and had met female captains she admired; the selection process is so rigorous, she thinks, that once you’ve got through, it’s a level playing field. Having said which, she’s heard “customers can be a bit, ‘hmmm’”, she says. “I’m sure there were some jokes about parking, or something awful like that.”

Cadet Amy Williams, who worked as a flight attendant; only 6% of pilots are women. Photograph: Fred MacGregor for the Guardian

CAE also tests spatial awareness, memory and instructability, verbal reasoning, pattern-matching and decision-making – often all at once, a test of nerves under pressure, but also a reasonable recreation of what a working pilot will have to do. After all this, and on the same day, you will be interviewed, to see if you are a person who might be trusted to accelerate a hunk of metal to 140 knots, to lift 850-odd people into the sky; to see if you possess, in Tom Wolfe’s phrase about fighter pilots, “the right stuff”.

The right stuff these days is not the macho thing it used to be, says psychologist Robert Bor, author of Anxiety At 35,000 Feet, when it largely meant being “cool, calm and collected, male, sexy, in control, carrying significant responsibilities, and of a glamorous lifestyle”. Cool, calm and collected all still apply – and were exhibited by Henkey, in spades, when he braked at 90mph, brought the plane to a standstill, then oversaw its evacuation on to the Last Vegas runway. But gung-ho macho individualism does not, says André Droog, president of the European Association for Aviation Psychology. This is both for reasons of safety, he says, and because the role of a pilot “has become much more that of a flight manager” – of crew, of complex computer systems, of the interaction between these, ground crew and control tower. So “we’re looking for emotional stability”, Droog says. “There should be confidence and a certain degree of dominance; on the other hand, they should not get over-dominant. They should be good listeners and good socialisers. They should be able to learn proper decision-making and be able to lead a crew.”

Above all, flight academies look for motivation, a yen for flying indistinguishable from vocation. “EasyJet describe it as being like a stick of rock,” says CAE centre manager Andrew McFarlane. “If we cut you in half, you’ve got easyJet written through you. You’ve got to love it.” Orange innards or no, something has to get you through the unsociable hours, the unpredictability, the fact, for instance, that long-haul pilots can be away from home for two-thirds of the time – and, above all, what it’s going to cost you. Before 9/11, pilot training was often paid for by airlines; now most pilots are self-sponsored. A course at CAE costs £87,500; this does not include accommodation, assessment fees (£250) or type-rating, whereby you learn to fly specific aircraft – for example, an Airbus A320 or a Boeing 737 – for anything from £21,000 to £32,000.

After a string of personal bankruptcies among recently qualified cadets (which she says have now peaked), Wendy Pursey, head of membership and career services at Balpa, wrote a pamphlet, Becoming A Pilot: The Inside Track. In it, she tries to steer a sensible line between encouragement and realism, pointing out that a cadet can graduate with repayment obligations of up to £1,500 a month, and no guarantee of a job – or, if they get a job, a starting salary as low as £29,000. Some student loans are available, but they do not cover the whole course, so the options are bank loans or family.

Every cadet I spoke to was being supported by parental loans, though CAE insists that having to pay for your own training has had less effect on the background of trainees than one might think. “There are lots of people from very ordinary backgrounds whose families just go the extra mile for them,” Field says. Pursey, who says there are currently 505 unemployed pilots on Balpa’s books, is more blunt: “Really, unless you come from a privileged background or your parents can release equity, you’re locked out.”

A survey of the 560 cadets in Balpa’s membership found that, for more than 50% of them, the cost of training would exceed £100,000. Only 12% had any kind of sponsorship; 45.2% had taken out a loan, while 41.9% were being helped by their parents.

“Hello!” An all-male chorus. Hulmes thumps his briefcase on the table, gets out his notes, rearranges a hunk of propeller sitting on his desk. CAE trains cadets from all over the world – France, Denmark, Italy, Turkey, the Emirates, Singapore, Finland, Montenegro – a new set of 20 or so, from up to 26 nationalities, coming through every three weeks. This class has a strong contingent from Air Algérie: when Hulmes turns his back, the whispering is in Arabic. But there isn’t much whispering: ground school is, as Field puts it, where “you sort the men from the boys” – he glances at me – “and the women from the girls”. If anyone is going to drop out, it will be during these six months, when cadets study everything from meteorology to human performance, radio navigation to air law, with two sets of seven exams, at three months and at six. The courses aren’t that difficult, says Hulmes, who used to be a flight engineer in the RAF; it’s more a case of volume and speed, which is very brisk indeed. You can almost feel the mental effort in the room.

Kevin Beale, 30, has just been promoted to chief flight instructor at CAE in Phoenix, Arizona, where, because the weather is predictable and the airspace largely empty, cadets spend 22 weeks working towards their target of 120 flight hours. But for the moment he is still here, and giving me my first ever flight briefing. Unlike the grizzled ex-RAF men who seem to make up most of the instructing staff, Beale is young, earnest, Tintin-smiley, but still a veteran – if only of the vicissitudes of latter-day aviation. He began as a trainee navigator in the RAF, but was laid off; went to Netjets Europe as a cadet, but its training programme was cancelled in the financial crisis.

“We always start with a clear aim for the lesson,” Beale says. “By the end of this lesson, we’ll be able to select any attitude [position] using the primary flying controls, and hold it. OK?”

I can’t quite believe I’m going to be allowed to fly a plane. “Um. OK.”

“The safety of the aircraft and the passengers is paramount,” Beale continues. “So the first question we’ve got to ask ourselves is, ‘Are we fit to fly?’” And – no surprise, in this industry bristling with acronyms, and endless checklists – there’s a mnemonic for it: I’M SAFE.

I is for illness. Cadets cannot even begin training without passing a class one medical, the most rigorous medical there is; they will be required to repeat this at frequent intervals for the rest of their careers. While these medicals include questions about mental health, they do not require full-scale psychiatric evaluations, and it is thought that these may be one likely outcome of the Germanwings investigation.

M is for medication. No self-medication of any type, including over-the-counter. The only exceptions, according to CAE Oxford, are medicines prescribed by “aviation medical examiners” from an approved list – yet it turned out that Lubitz, who suffered from severe depression, had not only been assessed as vulnerable to “imminent psychosis”, but was also on a cocktail of powerful drugs prescribed by various non-aviation examiners.

After the Germanwings crash, European regulators recommended two crew members should be in the cockpit at all times

S is for stress. Pilots are in many ways, Bor writes, “a unique occupational group”, due to the simultaneous demands for “good physical health and psychological stability”. But they are also shift-workers, their offices cramped flight decks 35,000ft in the air. Safety and training requirements mean that “almost monthly, you’re having some sort of test or check”, says retired captain Piers Applegarth, who flew Jaguars in the cold war before moving to BA. The medicals especially, Bor says, mean facing “the risk of losing one’s job… as often as every six months”. And many stresses have increased. When Applegarth began flying, airlines had mixed fleets on short-haul routes: because pilots flew only plane-types they were trained to fly, they had more time off. “Nowadays [BA] just use the Airbus fleet, which means pilots are working a lot harder, doing longer days with less time off.”

According to Balpa, long-haul pilots are increasingly required to fly gruelling “bullets”: “flying out to a destination on day one, overnighting and then flying back overnight on day two to day three”. “A lot of operators have pared margins down to the bone,” says Captain Dave Smith, who before he retired in 2009 flew British Airways jets for 35 years. “It’s only when it’s in the air that [a plane is] earning money – on the ground, it’s just a lump of metal and wires burning a hole in the airline’s balance sheet. Pilots are told, ‘No delays. If there’s a problem, we’ll sort it out later – just carry it with you, and off we go.’ If you do work for an airline that will discipline you if they think you’re causing delays unnecessarily – and there are one or two of them around – that leads to huge pressures on the pilots.”

The ideal route into work for a new pilot is with a short-haul carrier: it allows you to build up hours quickly, and is a swifter route to a captaincy. Most, however, graduate into the hardest part of their careers: the catch-22 of needing flying experience to get a job, while needing a job to get flying experience – and pay off your debt. At Ryanair, 70% of pilots are self-employed or employed through contract agencies, according to a European Commission/University of Ghent survey earlier this year. Since the financial crash of 2008, there is a growing trend in America and Europe for pilots to be on call at all times, but paid only when they are in the air – effectively working zero-hours contracts. Smith cites a 2009 crash in upstate New York in which the pilots misread their instruments and stalled. Among the findings of the investigation were the fact that the 24-year-old first officer (who, according to the New York Times, was paid only $23,900 a year) had to commute across America to get to work and often tried to catch up on sleep in the crew lounge. She was also heard sneezing on the recorder, and asking the captain if they could descend early to ease the pressure on her ears.

“It’s everybody’s responsibility to say, ‘Sorry, I have to take a rest or relax – it may go wrong if I go on,’” Droog says. “But I think in some low-cost carriers the employment contracts do not favour safety.” The European Cockpit Association has recently issued strongly worded warnings that so-called pay-to-fly (P2F) schemes “may negatively impact flight safety, by creating ‘perverse’ incentives for the individual pilot to fly at any cost… and for an airline to use ‘cheap’ P2F pilots to lower its costs… This leads to the paradox that on certain flights the pilot may be paying by far the highest fare for his/her seat.”

A is for alcohol, which is self-explanatory, although Bor points out there used to be a far higher tolerance for it as a stress-reliever than there is now; until, that is, a 1983 study found alcohol had an influence in nearly a third of aviation accidents and airlines suddenly started paying attention. Many now require a minimum eight-hour break between consumption and flight, though Bor notes that drink can in fact still impair pilot performance 48 hours later. In August, an airBaltic co-pilot was jailed for six months for turning up for work seven times over the legal limit. But this is very rare: according to the Federal Aviation Administration in the US, in 2013 only 13 pilots out of 11,000 failed random breath tests.

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F is for fatigue. Also obvious, you’d think, except that even experienced pilots, used to stringent self-monitoring, admit they can be taken off-guard. Thirty years ago, Smith says, “you might average 400-500 hours a year. Nowadays you’re often doing the legal maximum of 900 hours.” And that “can lead to long-term fatigue, which is insidious. You have to have your legal rests – one day off in seven, two in 14, they’re the basic minimums – but you’re waking up not feeling refreshed. It’s concentration – that’s what goes.” After Air France 447 crashed into the Atlantic on 31 May 2009, killing all 288 on board, it was found that the captain and his girlfriend had been up all night before he took command. He was taking a nap when his inexperienced co-pilot responded to the plane stalling by putting its nose up instead of down.

E is for eating (tricky to do well, if, for instance, you’re travelling through many time zones) but also, Beale says, for emotions. Droog says several colleagues have reported an increase in pilots looking for counselling. This is a good thing, he argues, but also an indication that “pressures are high in the system”. Having said which, pilots are famously defensive patients, according to Bor, a psychologist and pilot – with good reason, because the fear, until quite recently, has been that any evidence of neuroses or possible self-destructiveness will automatically lead to denial of certification and loss of licence. A sense of vocation might be a prerequisite for good piloting; it would also make the loss of that career particularly devastating. But “depression is very common in life”, Droog says, “and it should not immediately be a reason to stop anyone flying, especially if treated well and if recovered [from] well”.

This view is increasingly being reflected in practice: according to the Daily Mirror, which submitted a Freedom of Information request to the Civil Aviation Authority after the Germanwings crash, the number of British pilots diagnosed with mental illnesses such as depression, “adjustment disorder”, anxiety and stress disorder rose by 66% in the last five years, a change the CAA related directly to “the implementation of European regulations in 2012, [which made it] possible for existing aircrew to regain a medical certificate following complete recovery from a depressive illness while still taking certain maintenance medication”. In that time, 350 pilots were grounded, 276 of whom were subsequently granted medical approval to return to flying.

It seems clear from cockpit recordings that Germanwings pilot Lubitz used the security implemented after 9/11 – cockpit doors reinforced to withstand grenade blasts, and a locking system that can be opened by a code from outside, but overridden from within – to prevent his captain from entering and thus stopping him from flying into the mountain. There has in fact always been concern about the safety of this method: as Time magazine has reported, there are incidents that could have been prevented if it had been possible to get in, such as Helios Airways Flight 522, which crashed on 14 August 2005 when the pilots mistook depressurisation for an air-conditioning malfunction; and a Mozambique Airlines crash on 29 November 2013, which may also have been a murder-suicide.

After Germanwings, European regulators recommended that at least two crew members should be in the cockpit at all times. “Most of the pilot community don’t think it will make a blind bit of difference,” Smith says. “How are cabin crew [for instance] going to understand what the pilot’s doing?” And while it is standard practice for everyone to keep an eye on each other – for reasons of self-defence, if nothing else – it is unreasonable, he says, to expect that they should be responsible for noticing if people are acting abnormally. For one thing, there may be nothing to see: “Some people are very good at disguising personality traits.” For another, they would usually have no idea what “normal” means, because it is very unlikely that pilot and co-pilot will ever have met before the flight.

Pilots do not generally work in the same team from one flight to the next because, Hulmes says bluntly, “if you’re going to do that, you’d better get it right”. If, for instance, one pilot is autocratic and “the other more likely to give in”; or if one is a senior captain and the other recently graduated, it creates a highly skewed “cross-cockpit gradient” in which the junior or less autocratic pilot might struggle to point out mistakes.

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“When I was a single-seat pilot, I was used to making my own decisions,” says Barry Lennon, 64, the Northern Irish head of crew resource management at CAE, whose first career was flying Lightnings for the RAF. “And it almost felt a bit emasculating to share my decision-making process with someone else. I’ve got to tell him why I’m doing it? Explain it to him?” But the history of aviation accidents, he says, “is full of situations where one pilot knew things were going wrong but felt it wasn’t his place to speak up.” Like everyone at CAE, Lennon is not allowed to cite any actual accidents, but it isn’t difficult to find the textbook incident. It occurred in Tenerife on 27 March 1977, when, due to a pile-up of misunderstandings, a KLM captain mistakenly believed he had been cleared for takeoff in dense fog and ploughed into another Boeing 747, killing 583 people, making it the deadliest crash in aviation history. Lennon’s job now is to train cadets to speak up, to hold their ground, to listen, to work as a team, to echo each other through checklist after checklist after checklist.

The industry has found this so successful that the methods are being adopted in other fields such as surgery, where deferring to authority may also lead to fatalities.

***

So are you safe? I’m safe. Beale hands me a hi-vis jacket and headset, and we walk out on to the bright airfield. A Cessna is disconcertingly human-sized; wings at head height, tail at your shoulder, a small step jutting from the fuselage to help you clamber in. We draw the little doors closed, work through pre-flight checklists, turn a key in the ignition. “Scattered cloud,” says the automated American voice of the meteorological forecast, “wind variable, six knots.”

“You have control,” Beale says, as required of every pilot, regardless of the size of their command. “I have control,” I reply, also as required, and find that my feet on the rudder pedals are steering a surprised course down the yellow lines of the airfield and round on to the runway. “You have control,” I say. “I have control,” he replies. Takeoff checks, and then we are up and away. The Cessna feels like a matchbox in the sky, tiny, as Oxfordshire spreads out below us. After Phoenix, cadets return to do more flying here: the weather is, well, English, and the airspace full of flights in and out of Heathrow, Stansted, Luton, Gatwick.

“Look out for towns ending in –cester,” Beale says as we enter uncontrolled airspace. “They were Roman – there’ll be a straight road to follow.” We fly over the competing grandiosities of Blenheim and the Silverstone racetrack. “Follow me through,” Beale says, and I place a hand lightly on my control column, feeling how, as Beale manipulates his, the Cessna’s nose tips toward the ground, then up again. This is pitch. Left, and the plane rolls. Feet press the rudders, lightly, and it turns on a vertical axis, yawing. And if you do not return, fairly promptly, to level attitude in relation to the horizon, you’re in a downward spiral. “You have control.” Um. “I have control?” And so I do. The sheer amount of air out here is perversely comforting: there is space, to see what this does, and that, and that. Up, down, turn – I am flying, and it feels amazing.

There are increasing challenges and frustrations to being a modern-day pilot, not least the fact that airlines are far more comfortable if the autopilot is used as much as possible. But on a clear day you can still turn it off, and simply hand-fly the plane. And that, in the end, is what every pilot will tell you it’s all about; that’s where the job satisfaction lies

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